Review Summary: this album is the absolute best at dodging superlatives
Phoenix are a good band. I think ‘good’ is probably the perfect word, too, if there ever was one; closely followed by ‘fine’ or ‘nice’. I was in primary school when
Wolfgang Amadeus… came out, and I loved it. It was an album where every cotton-candy hook would only ever trail in to the next one, and soft-rock was as much an ethos as it was a sound. Now Phoenix find themselves walking up and down the same cobbled Italian streets you’d see in a rom-com, like it’s Groundhog Day without any of the interesting philosophical discourse that followed. At least it’s sunny out.
“Simple, pure emotions” dictate
Ti Amo, and I can’t begrudge how the band have kept to this motif. The record ignores the fact that emotions are never simple and quite often impure, which is okay in itself - pop music is meant to be enjoyed and not scrutinised. Phoenix, though, spin their inoffensive synth-pop songs in a way that actively shirks nuance, and so it’s a challenge to keep from growing tired after thirty seconds of its barely-there disco affectations. There's nothing offensively bad about this record, it just never leaves that one easy-to-romanticize block of cobblestone streets - with its stack of quaint townhouses and snug coffee shops.
Ti Amo just kind of wanders through its vacation without taking it in, without acknowledging any of the hangovers or the hotel rooms it just trashed. I’d call its contrived optimism sickening if I could bring myself to be anything but indifferent, but I can’t really help how these songs just drift around in the back of my head until they dissipate. It’s a strange feeling, too: the music here is jaunty and ebullient, shimmering and glossy; but somehow that vibe doesn’t latch on to listener. Nope, the hooks are timid
(Fleur de Lys) and the lyrics could believably have been borrowed from any random conversation between two overwhelmed tourists (
Tuttifrutti’s first verse). What
Ti Amo arrives to us as, then, is a self-absorbed disco record – flailing around on the dance-floor long after everyone else in the club has left. At least someone is having fun.
I don’t mind
Fior Di Latte, though. That song is pretty good. One could also call it fine, or nice.
